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Sound Salvation: Now-Again Records

The ways that black-derived, African-diasporic American popular music has influenced the world and vice versa is another unifying factor in the Now-Again catalog.

If the British Invasion was drawing inspiration from American blues, and then nodding toward India and Asia with drones, elements of raga and other far-flung influences, then the same thing was happening in other parts of the world. Only the process was inverted.

For instance, British and American music left a stamp on Yaghmaei’s Iranian rock, which veers from crooning to crushing. He was paying close attention to The Rolling Stones—he says as much in the liner notes—and you can hear it. But Yaghmaei didn’t need the sex or drugs to arrive at rock music with a Near-Eastern sound.

The route of influence was similar with the wide-ranging Indonesian bands on the Those Shocking, Shaking Days compilation. On the disc’s opening track “Haai,” the band Panbers announces its affinity for the Stones, The Beatles and Led Zeppelin. Deeper in, some of the bands’ songs sound like Deep Purple outtakes; some—like The Brims—could pass for Can; others—like the amazing Ariesta Birawa Group—don’t sound like anything you’ve ever heard before. A few of these acts were superstars, like the heavy Duo Kribo, but many of these Indonesian funk bands and rockers were footnotes on the Indonesian music scene. These recordings—some of which were salvaged from imperfect vinyl pressings or wonky cassette copies— could have slipped into oblivion.

“I want these records to be able to tell a story,” says Alapatt, who up until July 2011, ran the hip-hop label Stones Throw and continues to manage one of the its most popular artists like the rapper/producer Madlib.

The label isn’t limited to archival projects though, as recent releases have showcased Swiss (Dimlite) and Californian (MRR-ADM) drum-centric electronica pastiches. The point of connection between the obscure slabs of vinyl and experimental club music might seem faint, but Now-Again’s releases are clearly made for that subspecies of vinyl-obsessive, crate-digging music nerds—basically, DJs.

This year, Now-and-Again has major projects of fuzzed-out rock from the southern African nation of Zambia and a set of unusual funk from Nigeria in its pipeline.

“I’m very proud of my role as an archivist,” says Alapatt. “I’ve always thought that a record collector is an archivist, even if he’s only sharing it with a limited number of people who cross the threshold and listen to his records with him.”